Stalin

Soviet reliance on expensive short-term credits—the only kind predominantly available to the Communist regime—imposed relentless pressure to retire maturing debt and obtain new loans. With Soviet foreign debt more than doubling in the period 1929–31 (it would increase 50 percent in 1931 alone), rumors of a pending default spread in the Western press. (Turkey and much of Latin America defaulted at this time.)¹²⁹ On October 6, 1931, the British chargé d’affaires in Moscow wrote to London that the severe Soviet balance-of-payments crisis, on top of the failures to meet 1931 output targets, would even compel Moscow to break off rapid industrialization and collectivization.¹³⁰ Wishful thinking aside, the worsening terms of trade and tariffs did force the Soviets to curtail imports of consumer and even capital goods.¹³¹ But the Soviets meticulously paid their debts. The pressure to do so partly explains the regime’s continued export of grain despite fears for the harvest and low global prices.¹³² Only state-imposed deprivation allowed the USSR to avoid external default.

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST KULAK SABOTAGE

Compared with the robust 1930 harvest—officially estimated at 83.5 million tons, but closer to 73–77 million—the 1931 harvest would come in somewhere between 57 million and 65 million tons. A cutback in grain exports loomed, but Stalin stalled the reckoning, continuing to lash out at the “liberalism” of rural officialdom for failing to extirpate “the kulak.”¹³³ He also countenanced intensified religious persecution and ruination of churches.¹³⁴ Still, he had grudgingly allowed a slight reduction in procurement targets for the Volga, the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan, the most drought-stricken regions, while holding the line on Ukraine’s targets and raising the quotas for the North Caucasus (which had largely escaped the drought).¹³⁵ Mikoyan, on October 31, 1931, told a Central Committee plenum that on the eve of the harvest, “we had awaited the season of the grain collections with rainbow perspectives.”¹³⁶ Regional party bosses, given the floor, uttered the truth: drought and a poor harvest had rendered even the reduced quotas impossible. Stalin—who got his back up when officials cited natural causes as excuses—exploded, sarcastically mocking one speaker’s “exactitude” in adducing data on lower crop yields.¹³⁷ And yet, the dictator agreed to gather separately with plenum delegates from the grain-growing regions, which resulted in additional procurement reductions.¹³⁸

Growers were reluctant to sell even what they had at the regime’s punishingly low prices: in 1931, the market price per tsentner of rye was 61.53 rubles, versus the state price of 5.50; for wheat, the disparity was greater still.¹³⁹ But now, procurement agents grabbed even the food for minimal consumption. State collections in fall 1931 (and into early 1932) would leave farmers with less grain, meat, and dairy than in any year since the mid-1920s. “Comrade Stalin, I ask you to look into how collective farmers live on the collective farms,” urged one of the countless letters pouring in about the starvation. “At the meetings it is impossible to speak up; if you do speak up, then they say you are an opportunist.”¹⁴⁰

Stalin was the sole bulwark against retreat from building socialism. On November 16, 1931, as he was walking the short distance between party headquarters on Old Square and the Kremlin, down Ilinka Street, a former White officer and presumed British agent, whom the OGPU had under surveillance, chanced upon him.¹⁴¹ The man, who used the alias Yakov Ogarev, was said to have been so startled that he failed to pull his revolver from under his heavy overcoat. In another telling, the OGPU operative shadowing him had grabbed the enemy’s hand. Either way, Ogarev was arrested. “I recognized [Stalin] immediately from the likeness to his portraits I had seen,” he would testify. “He appeared shorter than I expected. He was moving slowly and looked at me intently. I also did not take my eyes off him.” There was no trial, no mention in the press.¹⁴² The politburo issued another secret resolution forbidding Stalin from walking Moscow on foot. The chance encounter somewhat recalled that of Gavrilo Princip and Franz Ferdinand on a Sarajevo street outside Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen in 1914. But the armed Ogarev was no Princip.

QUEST FOR NONAGGRESSION

Japan, with its invasion of Manchuria, had seized an industrial territory larger than Germany, France, and Austria combined, while losing just 3,000 killed, 5,000 wounded, and 2,500 frostbitten.¹⁴³ “Japan plans to seize not only Manchuria but also Peking,” Stalin wrote presciently to Voroshilov (November 27, 1931), adding, “It is not impossible and even likely that they will seize the Soviet Far East and Mongolia to soothe the feelings of the Chinese clients with territory captured at our expense.” He further surmised that the Japanese would claim to be safeguarding the region from “Bolshevik infection” while creating their own economic base on the mainland, without which Japan would be boxed in by “militarizing America, revolutionizing China, and the fast-developing USSR.”¹⁴⁴ Stalin supported “serious preventive measures of a military and nonmilitary character,” including additional units for the Soviet Far East, walking a fine line between showing weakness, which might invite attack, and overly strong measures, which might offer a casus belli.¹⁴⁵ He also reinforced Soviet efforts to conclude nonaggression pacts with countries on the western frontier. Such a pact had been signed with Lithuania (1926), but he sought them with Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Romania, and, above all, Poland.¹⁴⁶

Amid reports that the French government was encouraging Japan to launch a war against the USSR and trying to insert a clause into its draft bilateral pact with Moscow that would be invalidated by just such a third-party attack—all of which fit Stalin’s cynical view of the imperialist powers—he suffered an unpleasant surprise: fierce resistance to a nonaggression pact with Poland from inside the foreign affairs commissariat.¹⁴⁷

Stalin, finally, had replaced foreign affairs commissar Chicherin—a hypochondriac frequently absent abroad for treatment—with his deputy, Maxim Litvinov.¹⁴⁸ (In a bitter parting memorandum, Chicherin fulminated against Litvinov, the Comintern, and “the GPU, [which] deals with the foreign affairs commissariat as with a class enemy.”)¹⁴⁹ Litvinov, never a close associate of Stalin’s, became the face of the USSR abroad.¹⁵⁰ Whereas Chicherin was aristocratic and urbane, Litvinov was rough hewn. He was also Jewish. He had lived in exile in the UK from 1907 through early 1918 and afterward as a midlevel embassy counselor, spoke fluent accented English, and had married an English writer, Ivy Low, the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, whom he called his bourgeoise. He continued Chicherin’s orientation on Germany while seeking to make all of Europe his bailiwick, but Stalin subdivided the department and inserted rivals.¹⁵¹ Still, issues of Stalin’s control remained (foreign affairs personnel, about one third of whom were Jews, were better educated than functionaries of any other government body).¹⁵² A Polish offer to Litvinov to resume talks for a nonaggression pact had been rebuffed—and Stalin had been informed only ex post facto.¹⁵³

The dictator was convinced that Poland’s ruler, Józef Piłsudski, was secretly working to undermine Ukraine, but also that, without Poland, a major imperialist attack on the Soviet Union would be far less feasible.¹⁵⁴ A Polonophobe himself, he nonetheless warned Kaganovich not to be taken in by the foreign affairs commissariat’s “anti-Polonism.”¹⁵⁵ Stalin discovered, however, that any decrease in tensions with Poland threatened bilateral relations with Germany: the Reichswehr chief of staff, on a visit to Moscow, expressed fears that a Soviet-Polish nonaggression pact would guarantee Poland’s existing borders.¹⁵⁶

Litvinov was also working assiduously, alongside his deputy Lev Karakhan, for a nonaggression pact with Japan, hewing to Stalin’s line to stress Soviet noninterference and to make concessions.¹⁵⁷ On December 13, 1931, the OGPU decoded and forwarded to Stalin an intercepted transcript of a conversation between the Japanese military attaché in Moscow, Kasahara, and his superior (visiting from Tokyo), advocating for war before the USSR became too strong and underscoring that “the countries on the Soviet western border (i.e., at a minimum Poland and Romania) are in a position to act with us.”¹⁵⁸ The attaché added that the Japanese ambassador to Moscow, Kōki Hirota, thought “the cardinal objective of this war must lay not so much in protecting Japan from Communism as in seizing the Soviet Far East and Eastern Siberia.” Stalin circled these territories and circulated the intercept to the politburo and the military command, advising that the Soviet Union risked becoming, like China, a rag doll of the imperialists.¹⁵⁹

Also on December 13, Stalin sat for a two-hour interview with the German psychoanalytical writer Emil Ludwig. When Ludwig noted “a bowing before all things American” in the USSR, Stalin accused him of exaggerating. “We do respect American business-like manner in everything—in industry, in technology, in literature, in life,” the dictator allowed, adding: “The mores there in industry, the habits in production, contain something democratic, which you cannot say of the old European capitalist countries, where, still today, feudal aristocrat haughtiness lives.” Still, in terms of “our sympathies for any one nation, . . . I’d have to say it would be the Germans.” Stalin had been exiled in Siberia, and Ludwig delicately suggested a contrast with Lenin’s European emigration. “I know many comrades who were abroad for twenty years,” Stalin answered, “lived somewhere in Charlottenburg [Berlin] or the Latin Quarter [Paris], sat for years in cafés and drank beer, and yet did not manage to acquire a knowledge of Europe and failed to understand it.”¹⁶⁰ Ludwig inquired whether Stalin believed in fate. “Bolsheviks, Marxists, do not believe in fate,” he answered. “The very notion of fate, of Schicksal, is a prejudice, nonsense, a survival of mythology, the mythology of the ancient Greeks.” Ludwig pressed: “So the fact that you did not die is an accident?” Stalin: “There are internal and external factors whose totality led to the circumstance that I did not die. But utterly independent of that, another could have been in my place, because someone had to sit right here.”¹⁶¹

CONCEALED MILITARIZATION

Despite Soviet groveling, the Japanese government did not bother to reply through diplomatic channels to renewed offers of a nonaggression pact.¹⁶² Voroshilov, in a note to his deputy Gamarnik (January 13, 1932), parroted Stalin’s line of a likely Japanese invasion, yet added skepticism. “The creation of a Far Eastern Russian government is being projected and other claptrap,” he noted. “All of this is rumor, very symptomatic.”¹⁶³ On January 29, Artuzov forwarded to Stalin a secret report (obtained via a mole) by French military intelligence, which envisioned four scenarios for the outbreak of a war: German occupation of the Rhineland, following a possible Nazi revolution; an Italian strike against Yugoslavia, drawing in France; a grudge match between Poland and Germany; and “a conflict with the USSR agreed by many countries.”¹⁶⁴ The fourth scenario—Stalin’s fixation—was supported by other reports of France supplying Japan and Franco-German rapprochement.¹⁶⁵ Anti-Soviet circles in Paris were fantasizing that Japan would make available liberated Soviet territory for the émigrés’ triumphal return.¹⁶⁶ Molotov, at the 17th party conference (January 30–February 4, 1932)—lower in stature than a congress—warned that “the danger of imperialist attack has considerably increased.”¹⁶⁷

A pseudonymous “letter from Moscow” published in Trotsky’s Bulletin abroad reported that at the party conference, Stalin had been largely silent. “After every sitting, delegates and visitors were asked, ‘What did Stalin say?’” the report claimed. “‘Nothing.’”¹⁶⁸ True enough. Secretly, however, Stalin had embarked on energetic steps. Japan had changed his mind.

Whereas Tukhachevsky and the brass had long wanted to prioritize military production, Stalin prioritized heavy industry in general—the base of a modern economy, in his view—but now, just six months after having rejected Tukhachevsky’s wild spending requests, Stalin was himself demanding forced creation of 40 to 50 new divisions.¹⁶⁹ Following the replacement (January 5) of the Supreme Council of the Economy by three commissariats—heavy industry, light industry, and forestry—the regime created a unified main mobilization directorate in heavy industry for the defense factories.¹⁷⁰ On January 19, Stalin agreed to a commission on “tankification” of the Red Army, on which he placed Tukhachevsky, and rammed through a plan for 10,000 tanks in 1932. Fewer than 2,000 had been manufactured in 1931, but Stalin wielded the preposterous new target to force expansion of assembly lines and creation of systematic tank-building capability at tractor and automobile factories, too.¹⁷¹

Stalin needed advanced tank designs—and, amazingly, he got them. The Soviet trade mission in Britain had secured permission to purchase 15 Vickers-Armstrong medium (six-ton) tanks, 26 Carden Loyd light armored machine-gun carriers, and 8 Carden Loyd amphibious tanks, as well as a license for production and blueprints.¹⁷² In parallel, working undercover at the Soviet trade organization in New York, the OGPU had overcome the lack of diplomatic relations and a legal injunction to procure specifications for the Christie M1931 tank. (J. Walter Christie was an engineer, who sometimes tested his designs with race car driving, and his dual-drive tank designs were notable for their innovative suspension and speed; he had offered to sell the technology to the U.S. military, but it had declined.) Two “tractors” shipped out of New York were in reality Christie tanks without the turrets, which became the basis for production of the Soviet track-wheeled “BT” at the Kharkov Locomotive Plant.¹⁷³ The imported designs demanded more sophisticated motors, gearboxes, chassis, caterpillar tracks, optics, traversing mechanisms, and armor plating than Soviet industry had been producing.¹⁷⁴ Still, by the end of 1932, the Soviets, who had been incapable of producing a single decent tank, would manufacture 2,600.¹⁷⁵ Soviet military spending would skyrocket in 1932 to 2.2 billion rubles, from 845 million—all of which Stalin kept concealed.¹⁷⁶

OMINOUS SIGNS

Japanese troops entered Harbin, the main Soviet railway junction in China, on February 5, 1932, to the euphoria of anti-Soviet émigrés.¹⁷⁷ In late February, Soviet intelligence delivered another intercepted Kasahara letter to Tokyo promising that “if we were to attack the USSR, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states would join (but not immediately), supported actively by the French and the not inconsiderable force of White Russians along the border.”¹⁷⁸ Japanese military aircraft were violating Soviet airspace; Stalin ordered Soviet forces not to yield to the provocations of warmongers.¹⁷⁹ Still, the regime established the Far Eastern Fleet as a separate command and ordered up additional submarines.¹⁸⁰ On March 4, 1932, Izvestiya published excerpts from the decrypted secret Japanese telegrams calling for seizure of Siberia and the Soviet Far East. (Evidently, the Japanese had discovered that the Soviets had broken their codes.) Izvestiya underscored that, while Moscow maintained neutrality in the Sino-Japanese conflict, “the Soviet Union will not permit anyone to violate Soviet borders, advance into its territory, and capture even a tiny parcel of Soviet soil.”¹⁸¹ Tukhachevsky revisited the “PR” war plan, with preemptive destruction of Poland by “heavy bomber strikes in the Warsaw region” and tank armies on the ground.¹⁸²

Japan did not annex Manchuria, as it had the far smaller Taiwan and Korean Peninsula, but it orchestrated the proclamation of a puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchu Land) and, on March 9, installed Henry Pu-Yi, the deposed last Qing emperor (whom the Japanese had recently kidnapped), as head of state in what was the Qing ancestral homeland.¹⁸³ Ten days later, Karakhan offered assurances of Soviet restraint to Japan’s ambassador Hirota, who secretly advised Tokyo that it could do as it pleased in Manchuria.¹⁸⁴ Quietly, the Soviets were offering to recognize Manchukuo, sell Japan the Chinese Eastern Railway, and negotiate fishing rights, oil leases, and trade, in exchange for a Japanese halt to sponsorship of anti-Soviet émigré groups, but Tokyo displayed indifference. The Soviet envoy in Tokyo was instructed to convey that Moscow would not be intimidated.¹⁸⁵ Stalin’s options were narrow, however. Negotiations for nonaggression pacts had been concluded with Finland (January 21, 1932) and Latvia (February 5), and one would be signed with Estonia (May 4), but talks with Romania deadlocked over its disputed annexation of Bessarabia.¹⁸⁶ Negotiations with France were torturous and would not succeed until late fall.¹⁸⁷

Stalin received fresh reports that Warsaw had not desisted from attempts to destabilize Ukraine or cooperate with Japan in a possible military strike against the USSR.¹⁸⁸ Even so, negotiations with Poland would bear fruit in late summer, albeit in a pact valid for just three years. German fears were borne out: Stalin would bow to Poland’s insistence to insert a clause about the inviolability of the latter’s frontiers.¹⁸⁹ But Voroshilov had complained bitterly in a letter (March 12, 1932) to the Soviet envoy in Berlin that only because of necessity were the Reichswehr high commanders “‘friendly’ with us (hating us in their hearts).”¹⁹⁰ The pacts with Poland and France would effectively mark a break in the Soviet pursuit of the elusive special relationship with Germany predicated on Versailles pariah status. This posture had always been aimed at preemption of an anti-Soviet bloc, which the 1931 trade agreement with Berlin and the 1932 nonaggression pacts with Warsaw and Paris would manage to accomplish, for now.¹⁹¹ Still, Soviet intelligence, obsessed with the emigration, had difficulty discerning the motives of foreign governments.¹⁹² And the USSR had no alliances. Nonaggression pacts were signed between enemies.¹⁹³

PRESSURE FOR RETREAT

A land commissariat internal report in early 1932 noted that peasants were quitting the collectives by the hundreds of thousands to roam industrial sites in search of food.¹⁹⁴ The politburo shrank the bread allocation in cities for people on the lower-priority ration lists (numbers 2 and 3), affecting 20 million souls. There was little to ration.¹⁹⁵ Stalin knew. But every time he conceded grain procurement reductions, every time he allowed strategic reserves to go unfilled, the already low rations for workers had to be lowered and grain was not exported, putting the military-industrial buildup at risk. The much delayed first blast furnace at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine had been started up early 1932, in a furious rush in horrendous frosts, to coincide with the 17th party conference. Two giant chemical factories, the first aluminum factory, and a ball-bearing plant were started up, and the first four trucks rolled off the line at the Nizhny Novgorod auto factory. But these were political startups. At Magnitogorsk, the new blast furnace’s cone caved in; it had to be completely rebuilt. Industrial output began to stagnate or even decline in spring 1932.¹⁹⁶

Voices were being raised. “Although you, comrade Stalin, are a pupil of Lenin, your behavior is not Leninist,” the delegate Fedorintseva of the rural soviet “Soldier,” in the Black Earth region, wrote to Izvestiya in spring 1932. “Lenin taught: factories to the workers, land to the peasants, and what do you do? You confiscate not only land but livestock, huts, and possessions from the middle and poor peasants. You threw out Trotsky and call him a counterrevolutionary, but you, comrade Stalin, are the real and first Trotskyite, and a pupil not of Lenin but of Trotsky. Why? They taught us in political circle that Trotsky proposed to build socialism with force at the expense of the muzhik.”¹⁹⁷ Trotsky added his own voice. “Separated from the apparatus, Stalin is . . . a nullity, an empty void,” he wrote in a new “open letter” to the party, in his Bulletin of the Opposition (March 1, 1932), predicting that “the man who yesterday was the symbol of the might of the apparatus tomorrow might become in everyone’s eyes the symbol of its bankruptcy.”¹⁹⁸

Suddenly, the regime backed down from socialization of all livestock, with a decree (March 26, 1932) initiated by land commissar Yakovlev and accepted by Stalin. Functionaries in the commissariat interpreted it as a retreat from collectivization—some asked whether it contained a typo—but the aim was tactical: to end flight from the collectives. Local officials did not hurry to return collectivized animals.¹⁹⁹

Not coincidentally, speculation about the dictator’s health, typical in any dictatorship, intensified. “This is not the first time that false rumors that I am ill have circulated in the bourgeois press,” Stalin wrote in a letter published in Pravda (April 3). “Sad though it may be, the fact is that I am in perfect health.”²⁰⁰

Ukraine party boss Kosior reported to Stalin that one quarter of the republic’s horses had died, and that the surviving ones were “skin and bones.”²⁰¹ The OGPU reported that in Borisov, in the Belorussian republic, a crowd had seized grain warehouses, and several hundred women and children had marched on the local Red Army barracks (“signs of commiseration could be seen among the soldiers and officers”).²⁰² In the textile mills of the Ivanovo region, ration cuts of up to one half, on top of labor intensification measures, provoked strikes and spontaneous assemblies.²⁰³ A sign placed in a shopwindow read “Even as the starving workers of Vichuga and Teikovo were being fired upon because they agitated for bread, here, behind the store’s drawn curtains, Communist functionaries and Red police of the GPU were fattening themselves up.”²⁰⁴ Ten thousand demonstrators ransacked the party and police buildings (“Toss the Communists . . . out the window”). Stalin dispatched Kaganovich, who mobilized local party agitators to speak with workers and himself heard out their grievances.²⁰⁵

Ivanovo’s striking workers did not reject socialism, only its building at their expense, and mostly blamed local officials for their plight.²⁰⁶ They shared a resolute anticapitalism with the Soviet regime, but that anticapitalism afforded the regime bureaucratic control over workers’ employment, housing, and food. The strikers were further stymied by the state monopoly over newspapers, radio, and the public sphere. More profoundly still, the strikers were trapped in the socialist vocabulary of class war.²⁰⁷ Kaganovich’s report for Stalin unfurled clichés, but, unlike the workers, the regime drew power from Bolshevik language: in conditions of “capitalist encirclement,” Kaganovich could equate worker criticism with playing into the imperialists’ hands. He managed to browbeat most strikers back to the shop floor, after which the OGPU arrested worker organizers and officials accused of worker sympathies.²⁰⁸

GRUDGING CONCESSIONS, PRIVATE APOLOGY

In parades on the May Day holiday in 1932, the Soviets offered the first public demonstrations of the Red Army’s mechanization—not only in Moscow, but in Leningrad, Kharkov, Kiev, Tiflis, and Khabarovsk.²⁰⁹ That same day, the first stage of the Dneprostroi hydroelectric dam supplied power, and this launch would prove durable. (“We are talking to you from the roof of an immense Bolshevik triumph!” gushed Soviet radio.)²¹⁰ Still, workers could not eat or clothe themselves with tanks and electricity.²¹¹ On May 4, Stalin led a politburo discussion that culminated in reduced procurement targets and acceptance of a commission’s recommendation to purchase hundreds of thousands of livestock from Mongolia, western China, Iran, and Turkey.²¹² On May 6 and 10, the regime issued decrees announcing the grain procurement reductions for collective farmers and the remaining individual household farmers, from 22.4 million to 18.1 million tons. The targets for state farms were raised, from 1.7 to 2.5 million, for a new overall target of 20.6 million. This was just 81 percent of actual 1931 procurements. The decrees even forbade further liquidation of individual household farms, ordered the return of confiscated livestock and an end to lawlessness, and stipulated that, after peasants had met procurement quotas for the harvest (deadline: January 15, 1933), they could freely trade in any surplus directly with consumers at “collective farm markets.”²¹³

Could it be? As recently as the October 1931 party plenum, Mikoyan, speaking for Stalin, had flatly rejected suggestions to permit rural trade at market prices after fulfillment of state obligations.²¹⁴ But now peasants were permitted to maintain their own cows (though not horses), cultivate household plots, and sell a significant portion of the fruits of their labor at market prices.²¹⁵ To be sure, private property in the means of production remained outlawed (household plots could not be sold or inherited). Still, it turned out that peasants had to be incentivized with private livestock holdings and market sales of even some of their collective farm output. Workers, too, had to be provided incentives through wage differentiation.²¹⁶ State-owned and state-managed factories were not permitted to engage in direct marketlike relations with one another, but they did so illegally. “The necessity of avoiding a break in production,” one official at Magnitogorsk explained, “will compel the receiving factory to seek the necessary materials from other sources by every possible means.”²¹⁷

The surprises kept coming. Stalin returned Shaposhnikov to a high-profile post in the capital, as director of the Frunze Military Academy, and on May 7, 1932, he even sent a written apology to Tukhachevsky for having denounced his January 1930 super-rearmament memorandum as Red militarism. “Two years later,” Stalin wrote, with a copy to Voroshilov, “when some unclear matters have become clearer for me, I must confess that my judgment was too severe, and that the conclusions of my letter were not correct in all respects.” Stalin noted that Tukhachevsky had been suggesting a peacetime army not of 11 million (per Shaposhnikov’s accusations) but of “8 million souls” and suggested that 6 million well-supplied, well-organized troops were “more or less within our capabilities.” (Soviet forces still numbered fewer than 1 million.) Stalin added: “Do not curse me for the fact that I corrected these shortcomings outlined in my [1930] letter with a certain tardiness.”²¹⁸

What was next? Stalin had long forbidden directing more consumer goods to villages to incentivize the flow of grain, but now he acquiesced in this, too.²¹⁹ He even agreed to importing grain (“54,000 tons of grain have already been purchased in Canada,” he telegrammed the party boss of Eastern Siberia on May 8. “You will get your share”).²²⁰ Tellingly, however, Stalin does not appear to have initiated a single one of these concessions, and invariably he issued barbed reminders of the need for unconditional fulfillment of centrally assigned procurement targets and the perfidy of capitalism.²²¹ Unlike Lenin in 1921, Stalin was not willing to admit a “retreat” or neo-NEP.²²² This reflected his touchiness about admitting any mistakes, desire to maintain his authority at the system’s apex, and nonnegotiable ideological commitment.²²³

Mongolia, the Soviet satellite, provides a stark contrast. Zealots of the Mongolian People’s Party, egged on by Comintern advisers, had launched a “class war” against “feudalism,” confiscating estates, ransacking Buddhist lamaseries, killing nobles and lamas, and collectivizing herders.²²⁴ At least one third of the livestock—the country’s main wealth—was lost. Inflation soared, shortages proliferated. In spring 1932, revolts led by lamas overtook four provinces in the northwest, amid rumors that either the elderly Panchen Lama (from Tibetan exile) or the Japanese would arrive with troops to liberate Mongolia from Communist occupation.²²⁵ The uprisings took Stalin by surprise (“The latest telegrams reported successes; therefore, such an unexpected and sharp deterioration is incomprehensible”). The Soviets dispatched consumer goods and ten fighter planes, which strafed the rebels; about 1,500 would be killed. Facing annihilation, rebels engaged in murder and cannibalism.²²⁶ On May 16, the politburo condemned the Mongolian party for “blindly copying the policy of Soviet power in the USSR.” Mongolian ruling officials were ordered to abandon collectivization of nomads, proclaim an “all-people’s government,” and publicly repudiate the noncapitalist path in Mongolia’s current conditions. The shift would be confirmed at a Mongolian People’s Party plenum and be dubbed the New Course.²²⁷ It was the full reversal Stalin would not countenance at home.

PANIC AROUND HIM

Whether the grudging concessions could save the situation was uncertain. “Stalin figured out trade with collective farms late,” the OGPU reported of one worker’s reaction in Minsk. “If he had thought about this in 1929–30, it would have been better, but now nothing will come of it, because the peasants have nothing; everything was destroyed.”²²⁸ Union-wide stocks of food and fodder amounted to perhaps a month’s supply, with less than that in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Lower Volga. A rattled Kuibyshev handwrote a supersecret memo in blue pencil on May 23, 1932, proposing to slice rations even for those with absolute highest priority (“special list” and “list 1”). The politburo rejected this, but it reduced allocations to the Red Army by 16 percent and resolved to accelerate grain imports from Persia.²²⁹ Molotov led a commission to Ukraine that reported (May 26) that “the situation is worse than we supposed,” and suggested granting still more “loans” of seed, fodder, and food. Stalin conceded release of another 41,000 tons of seeds from the strategic reserves in Ukraine and Belorussia.²³⁰ These loans—which would reach 1.267 million tons Union-wide for the year, three times the amount provided in spring 1931—were supposed to be returned from the pending 1932 harvest, seed for seed.²³¹

In late May, Stalin departed for his annual southern holiday, which would be especially prolonged (through late August). “The number of politburo inquiries has no effect on my health,” he wrote from Sochi. “You can send as many inquiries as you like—I’ll happily answer them with pleasure.”²³² He rebuffed requests to send Red Army troops to Mongolia. “We cannot conflate Mongolia with Kazakhstan or Buryatia,” he instructed Kaganovich (June 4), adding that Mongolian officials “should announce that the leaders of the rebellion are agents of the Chinese and especially the Japanese imperialists, who are seeking to strip Mongolia of its freedom and independence.”²³³ He also ordered documents concerning Soviet-Mongolian relations evacuated from Ulan Bator.²³⁴ “The Japanese, of course (of course!), are preparing for war against the USSR,” he wrote to Orjonikidze in June 1932, “and we need to be ready (for sure!) for everything.”²³⁵ Stalin kept up the pressure. “Will our industrialists produce the planned number of tanks, airplanes, antitank weapons?” he wrote to Voroshilov (June 9). “Have the bombers been sent to the East? Where, exactly, and how many? The trip on the Volga was interesting—I’ll say more: magnificent. A great river, the Volga. Damn.”²³⁶

Stalin’s mood oscillated. “It seems I shall not be getting better anytime soon,” he complained to Kaganovich in mid-June. “A general weakness and real sense of fatigue are only now becoming evident. Just when I think I am beginning to get better, it turns out that I have a long way to go. I am not having rheumatic symptoms (they disappeared somewhere), but the overall weakness is not going away.”²³⁷ He was chauffeured to his usual polyarthritis salt baths at nearby Matsesta. While on the terrace or out fishing, he would tell tales of the revolutionary underground and prison. He tended to his mandarins, berries, and grapes and played badminton or skittles with a cook against a bodyguard. Evenings, he competed in billiards, and the losers, which included himself, crawled under the table to absorb the winners’ banging from above. Gypsy dances and other performances accompanied the late-evening meals and drinking. The lights usually went out in his quarters at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.

Stalin’s holiday mailbag delivered increasingly dire news. “Because of the general famine, as you know, villagers have started flocking” to train stations, the Stalin loyalist Hryhory Petrovsky, in Ukraine, wrote on June 10, 1932. “In some cases, two thirds of the men had left their villages in search of bread.”²³⁸ (Yagoda reported on construction of a dacha settlement in the environs of Moscow using state funds for the grain collection commissariat.)²³⁹ Stalin held firm, proposing (June 18) the convocation of party secretaries from the main grain-growing provinces and republics to ensure “unconditional fulfillment of the plan.”²⁴⁰ He ordered up an editorial in Pravda demonstrating “with documentation the complete victory of the collective and state farms in agriculture, since the weight of the individual farming sector this year does not even reach 20 percent” (a reference to sown acreage). He added, “It is necessary to curse rudely and sharply all the lackeys of capitalism—Mensheviks, SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries], Trotskyites, and right deviationists—stating that the attempts of the enemies of the toilers to return the USSR to the capitalist path have been decisively defeated and turned into ashes, that the USSR has irreversibly adopted the new socialist path, that the decisive victory of socialism in the USSR can be considered already finalized.”²⁴¹ The editorial duly appeared (June 26, 1932). That same day, Stalin conceded a significant reduction in grain exports for the third quarter.²⁴²

The first mass-produced Soviet heavy bomber, the four-engine TB-3, had been tested in the air, but Voroshilov reported (“Dear Koba”) that just four had been manufactured, and that even these had malfunctioning radiators.²⁴³ He also had to inform Stalin about a shocking number of crashes in training: eleven aircraft downed just between June 5 and 20, killing thirty crew members. Voroshilov asked permission to join Stalin for a few days down south (“I have not been sleeping normally for a long time”). Stalin wrote back on June 24: “The most worrisome are the crashes and the deaths of our aviators. The loss of airplanes is not as scary (the hell with them) as the loss of living people, aviators. Live human beings are the most valuable and most important thing in our entire cause, especially in aviation.”^{244, 245}

Regional party bosses gathered in Moscow on June 28, 1932, and Molotov read out Stalin’s stern letter (sent ten days earlier): “In Ukraine, despite a harvest that was not bad, a number of districts with good harvests turned out to be in a state of ruin and famine.”²⁴⁶ This was the second known documented instance when Stalin used the word “famine” (golod).²⁴⁷ Molotov and Kaganovich approved only a slight reduction in procurements.²⁴⁸ Stalin, in two telegrams (July 1 and 2, 1932), spewed venom on Ukraine’s leadership (“demobilizers”) and ordered both of his top minions to attend Ukraine’s upcoming party conference.²⁴⁹ At that gathering (July 6–9), Kosior (a USSR politburo member) pointed out that some regions were already starving, while Ukraine government head Vlas Chubar (a candidate USSR politburo member) challenged Molotov and Kaganovich to go out and see for themselves.²⁵⁰ Afterward, Kaganovich wrote to Stalin that “all members of the [Ukraine] politburo . . . spoke in favor of lowering the plan” for deliveries, but “we categorically turned aside a revision.”²⁵¹

Then, on July 24, Stalin undermined their hard work. “Our governing directive that the grain collection plan for the USSR be fulfilled unconditionally is correct,” he wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov. “But bear in mind that an exception must be made for the districts in Ukraine that have suffered especially. This is necessary not solely from the point of view of justness, but also in view of the special condition of Ukraine and its common frontier with Poland.”²⁵² The next day, he again tried to explain his turnabout, suggesting that at the time of the Ukraine party conference he had not wanted “to derail the grain procurements.” What Kaganovich and Molotov made of Stalin’s zigzagging remains unknown. Stalin was banking on the harvest, whose “prospects,” he wrote, “will become clear (they have already become clear!): they are doubtless good for the USSR as a whole.” But the harvest was being overreported, and Stalin latched on to what he wanted to hear.²⁵³

Sown acreage had shrunk noticeably. Tractive power, seed grain, and fodder were scarce. The spring sowing season had proved short, and wheat sown beginning in late May always produced lower yields and was more susceptible to August rains, which would descend torrentially as early as the beginning of the month. Rust epiphytotics damaged a significant part of the wheat harvest, to the surprise of officials who had failed to identify it.²⁵⁴ Demoralized farmers forced into collectives were threshing and using manure sloppily and showing disregard for collectivized animals.²⁵⁵ Voroshilov had been granted his holiday, and on July 26 he wrote to Stalin about what he saw traveling south: “a scandalous infestation of the grain with weeds” in the North Caucasus.

The defense commissar appeared to be buckling under the pressure, complaining that “when one sees our military cadres, it is enough to make one a misanthrope,” and adding: “I cannot even say that these people do not work; on the contrary, they work until they are exhausted, but with no results.”²⁵⁶ Stalin kept up the pressure. “Six bombers for the Far East is nothing,” he responded (July 30). “We need to send no fewer than 50 to 60 TB-3s. And this needs to be done as soon as possible. Without this, the defense of the Far East is only an empty phrase.”²⁵⁷

An OGPU report to the “Central Committee” (August 1, 1932) estimated rifles at just 85 percent of needs, stationary machine guns at 68 percent, hand grenades at 55, revolvers at 36, modernized howitzers at 26 percent, 107-millimeter shells at 16 percent, and 76-millimeter shells at 7. Only a third of the projected 150 divisions could be fully outfitted.²⁵⁸ Nonetheless, that same day, the politburo confirmed Kuibyshev’s recommendation to reduce capital investments by a whopping 10 percent—more than that in heavy industry. Orjonikidze exploded. Kaganovich sought to conciliate him (“My friend, the financial situation required it”) while making clear that Stalin had signed on (“We wrote to our chief friend, and he thought it absolutely correct and timely to make cuts”).²⁵⁹ In mid-August, yet another Chinese commander resisting the Japanese managed to flee to Soviet territory, but the Japanese army pursued him. The war minister in Tokyo was said to have been barely restrained from launching an attack on the USSR.²⁶⁰

SUMMER DOOM

Telegrams, letters, and reports swamped Sochi with news of mass death of horses, mass failure to sow crops, mass starvation, mass flight from collective farms, and a bewildering lack of government response.²⁶¹ Andrew Cairns, a Scottish Canadian agricultural expert sent by the Empire Marketing Board, in London, to determine if Western farmers might learn something from Soviet collectivization, managed to travel around Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus lowlands, and the Volga valley from May through August 1932, and he observed women pulling up grass to make soup. Of urban canteens he noted, “As each worker finished his meal there was a scramble of children and one or two women and men for their soup plates to lick, and their fish bones to eat.”²⁶² Throughout August 1932, unsigned editorials in Pravda lashed out at kulak “machinations” and grain “speculators.”

Stalin also received reports that “spoilage” was exaggerated and that grain was being stolen from slow-moving freight trains or slipped into ample pockets during mowing, stacking, or threshing, or just not being gathered (remaining in the fields to be eaten). He insisted to Kaganovich that just as private property under capitalism was sacred, so state property under socialism had to be recognized as “sacred and inviolable.”²⁶³ The dictator drafted a law, issued on August 7, 1932, that imposed the death penalty for the minutest theft of collective farm grain.²⁶⁴ He congratulated himself (“It is good”) and ordered a follow-up secret directive on the law sent to party organizations.²⁶⁵ Pravda (August 8) placed the pitiless law on an inside page; Kaganovich corrected this the next day with a front-page editorial.²⁶⁶ Other articles called for firing squads no matter the size of the theft. (One could view the compulsory state grain procurements—paying a mere 4.5 to 6.1 rubles per 100 kilos of rye, and 7.1 to 8.4 rubles for wheat, below production costs—as a form of grand theft, even as this enabled black bread to be sold in cities for just 8 to 12 kopecks a kilo.)²⁶⁷ Some politburo members had objected to the law in draft, but in reporting the objections to Sochi, Kaganovich had omitted names.²⁶⁸

Stalin exploded at Kaganovich (August 11) over fresh requests from Ukraine to lower procurement targets yet again. “Things in Ukraine have hit rock bottom . . . about fifty county party committees having spoken out against the grain procurement plan, deeming it unrealistic. . . . This is not a party but a parliament, a caricature of a parliament.” He demanded removal of Kosior and Chubar, and the demotion of Ukraine OGPU chief Redens. “Bear in mind that Piłsudski is not daydreaming, and his agent network in Ukraine is much stronger than Redens or Kosior think,” Stalin noted. “Also keep in mind that the Ukrainian Communist party (500,000 members, ha-ha) contains quite a few (yes, many!) rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites [a reference to the civil war Ukrainian nationalist], even direct agents of Piłsudski. If things get worse, these elements will not hesitate to open a front inside (and outside) the party, against the party.” Stalin warned direly: “Without these and similar measures (economic and political strengthening of Ukraine, in the first place in its border districts and so on), I repeat, we may lose Ukraine.”²⁶⁹

Polish spies were infiltrating the USSR, and being caught.²⁷⁰ At the same time, the Polish government had just signed the three-year bilateral nonaggression pact with Stalin, easing the pressure.²⁷¹ Perhaps he was using the threat to sustain Kaganovich’s severity or just could not let go of his fixation on an imperialist intervention provoked by internal difficulties. In the same note, Stalin informed Kaganovich that he had decided to appoint Balytsky as OGPU plenipotentiary in Ukraine and had already spoken with Mężyński. On the sacking of Kosior and Chubar, however, the crafty Kaganovich pushed back, ever so gently—“It is harder for me to judge than you”—and Stalin relented.²⁷² Belatedly, the dictator also accepted land commissar Yakovlev’s critique of excessive expansion of sown area, which disrupted crop rotation, and he reluctantly allowed a slowing to enable crop rotation to be reintroduced.²⁷³ But when, on August 20, 1932, Boris Sheboldayev, party boss in the North Caucasus, telegrammed to report that the harvest had turned out even lower, and farmers were in revolt, Stalin answered, with a copy to Kaganovich: “Either the local party committee is being diplomatic toward the population or it is leading the Central Committee by the nose.”²⁷⁴

Nadya had again accompanied him to Sochi, with the children, Vasily (then ten) and Svetlana (five), but she again returned to Moscow before he did. “We have built a marvelous little house,” Stalin wrote of a new Sochi dacha, to the man in Moscow responsible for such properties down south, Yenukidze, just as his holiday was coming to a close.²⁷⁵

“GRAVEDIGGER OF THE REVOLUTION AND OF RUSSIA”